[Koha-devel] New Koha Logo

[MJ Ray]

I really don't want to write reams on this topic, as it's a necessary
evil rather than something I love doing. Also, the more I write on
it, the more likely I am to fluff a line and get the wrong meaning,
especially these days. I've checked the following twice, but excuse
errors ;-)

Rachel wrote:
> I need some help on the whole "what license thing" - the situation I'm
> least keen on, is say the "egg" being associated with some other
> product/company name - ie becoming dissociated from Koha and attached to
> something else.  IS that covered by the GPL type license?

No. If it's another library system which is attempting to pass
itself off as koha, then it may be a fraud (legal name varies between
jurisdictions). You can register a trademark to make it simpler, but
there are two large gaps which many people don't seem to notice:

1. For free software like koha, anyone can use the trademark as long
as it's an honest description of the origin of the goods - that is,
they are actually distributing something based on koha. This is the
same rule that allows used car dealers to advertise MGs as MGs.

2. For other things like a hockey club, they could use it because
the field of a trademark is usually declared at registration and
koha isn't related to hockey or anything similar.

I haven't looked at non-English trademark law, but I expect similar
things exist in many places.  One can use copyright licensing to prevent
both of those uses, but you have the same arguments as against forbidding
copying of programs. I hope most of koha-devel see giving some copyright
permission is A Good Thing. On the shoulders of giants and all that.
They might do a really great version of it and then we might want to
use that.

Logos often seem to be restrictively licensed and, to be honest, I think
it's a massive pain in the backside. Just look at all the trouble that
the Mozilla Foundation logos are causing, or even debian's own "open use"
logo. Fortunately, the debian one is being fixed (slowly).

If a logo is released as free software, you have difficulty restricting
its use. That's just as bad/good as the rest of the system.  I guess I
think you're a bit paranoid ;-) Really, what harm would a hockey team
using the logo do? Other firms pay good money to sponsor sports clubs.

As far as software goes, koha is probably as protected as possible.
We can register trademarks, but then you have overhead to enforce it if
you want to keep the registration active (as if you don't challenge known
unlicensed use then some jurisdictions see it as abandoning the trademark,
I'm told).  Do we really want legal work just to stand still?

Putting the logo under the same licence as the rest of the system would
at least keep things as simple as they are. I think asking people to
improve ugly logos is fine, but it would be a bit scary if you can force
them or else put them in court.

MJR/slef

PS: Creative Commons licences are not free software licences. Avoid.

PPS: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but I have been
contributing to debian-legal for a few years, mostly sanely.  I was
cautioned for copyright infringement by a past employer and after that,
I thought I'd learn some. I know even less non-English law.